


Even The Best Glues

by gala_apples



Category: Bandom, Cobra Starship, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Depression, Gen, Magic, Psychotropic Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-29
Updated: 2012-08-29
Packaged: 2017-11-13 03:07:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/498764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gala_apples/pseuds/gala_apples
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete and Gabe find out the hard way that snorting pixie dust is a really fucking bad idea.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Even The Best Glues

People don’t approve of pixie for a lot of reasons. Some people are straight edge, their body is their temple. Gabe’s body is his nightclub, he plans on enjoying it. Most of them are hypocrites anyway, drinking coffee or Mountain Dew or Coke or Pepsi, eating sugar, smoking cigarettes. Some people don’t like it because it’s snorted, not smoked or eaten, and snorting drugs is ‘too hardcore’. Which is crap. When you eat datura it lasts at least twenty-four hours, pixie’s only six hours.

The majority don’t like it because it’s inhumane. After all, it _is_ pixie bones ground to dust. But Gabe doesn’t see the evil in it. Pixies are fast fuckers, no human is fast enough to catch one against their will. Pixies revealed themselves when Gabe’s dad was a kid, and in all the time since there hasn’t been a single pixie murdered by a human, anywhere in the world. Pixies do it to themselves, because they’re regenerative. Hell, most of the time they sell to you with a limb still missing to prove it’s the real shit. It’s far more effective than a human dealer saying he’s got the ‘best kush ever’.

So yeah, Gabe does pixie, and no, he doesn’t feel guilty about it. Joints didn’t fund 9/11 and doing dust doesn’t murder pixies. He’s not addicted, or he’s a functioning addict, whatever. He doesn’t know where the line is drawn and doesn’t much care, as long as the rest of his band doesn’t.

He takes the dime bag and pours it onto the table, making sure every grain is out. It’s not like coke; you don’t pour it all out because it’s eight lines worth and the minute you come down you need more and you get frustrated at having to take the time to draw more lines. A dime bag holds one high’s worth, and miraculously, no matter how often you do pixie you don’t build a tolerance. Which is good, considering pixies much more moralistic than necessary. None of the dealers Gabe’s ever met has let him buy more than one bag, and other pixies somehow sense if you’ve already got and refuse to sell to you. It’s a system that makes it easier to be functional. It’s hard to buzz for three days straight when you have to ask all your closest friends to buy you a dose because the pixies won’t sell to anyone still high, and you don’t want to wait until you come down to ask because it defeats the purpose.

Gabe finds drawing lines soothing. It’s not important to get them even and equal, like it is with coke. There’s no group to eyeball the biggest lines and try to claim them for themselves, nor is he doing it alone and needing to continue the rush again and again by snorting more, only to realise the fourth line was significantly smaller than the first three and get mad when he only stays high for ten more minutes. Technically he doesn’t have to make lines at all. He’s doing all of it in one go, he has to or he won’t get high, so he _could_ just stick the straw in the heap of ground bone and snort until it’s all gone. But there’s not enough ritual to that, so Gabe sits and pushes the powder around with his credit card. It’s better.

He hears the front door open, but doesn’t bother to get up. All the important people have keys, people that don’t need to be welcomed and shown where to hang hoodies or put their shoes because they already know. Nor does he try to quickly hide his stash. The only people that have a key and that don’t know about his habits are his parents and they _always_ call first. In fact, the more abrupt the visit, the more likely it’s someone that will want to enjoy narcotics with him.

Pete comes in to the kitchen, pours himself a glass of pear juice and grabs an open bag of mini pretzels. He’s sitting at the table, hand in the bag before he says hi, and Gabe only briefly looks up from his work to say hey back. Gabe knew he was off tour, didn’t know he was coming here. Pete doesn’t often live in the house he owns, he’d much rather stay with friends. There’s a ninety percent chance Pete’s got a duffel by his shoes at the front door, that he’ll be in the guest room for the next week. Gabe doesn’t mind. He has a guest room for a reason.

“Lemme try,” Pete says, gesturing to the pixie. Gabe looks up again to see if Pete’s joking. As long as Gabe’s known him he’s been an abstainer. Not a douchey, in your face straight edge prick, Gabe doesn’t have friendships with that sort of person. He isn’t even very good at maintaining civility with them. It’s just Pete’s brain already makes its own interesting chemicals, and he doesn’t need more to get off kilter.

It doesn’t look like he’s joking. In fact, Pete currently looks like he’s never made a joke or had a sense of humour or a halfway happy time in his life. It’s more than just the red eyes swollen from lack of sleep and the bitten ragged lip, Pete’s got those at the best of times. Pete looks like he’s breaking into pieces. Gabe’s felt that, and knows that sometimes the best glue is something that artificially raises your spirits. He’s covered many a bad mood with mushroom husks, drowned fears with the bravery of tequila. Far be it from him to deny Pete the same.

“This is only one dose, but lemme call Mr T.”

Pete snorts. It’s not a pleasant sound. It’s uncomfortable, forced as hell. It’s not humour. “Mr T, seriously?”

“Fuck off, their names are unfathomable to humans. It was the only letter I recognised. What do you want from me?”

“What?”

Has Pete seriously never noticed? “Yeah, as soon as they say it it’s like it slides right out your ears, like your brain’s fucking teflon. Didn’t you ever notice not being able to dedicate posters and shit? Didn’t you ever talk to a pixie at a meet and greet?” Pixies generally have their own culture, but there’s crossover. Not enough for pixie sized merch, but most auditoriums have raised platforms for pixie seating, even though they fly most of the time. Cobra has a few pixie fans, he’s sure Fall Out Boy must too.

“Not their life stories, family names.”

“Right, they want yours instead.” It’s still a bit weird to him, that Pete wouldn’t notice not being able to understand the proper nouns pixies say. Hell, nobody even knows what they really are, they’re just called pixies because they match the drawings. But he’s not going to give Pete shit for it, not now. Maybe later, when Pete is back to normal.

“Like everything we’ve got isn’t on the internet already.” The bitter words are cue for Gabe to press send on Mr T’s number. Pete needs it.

Twenty minutes later and they’re back in the kitchen. It fucking pays off to have a dealer that lives at the end of the street. It took Gabe longer to convince him that it wasn’t for him, it was for Pete, than it did to get there and back.

Pixie is different from snorting coke in another way. It still drips down the back of your sinuses, but it doesn’t taste searing, like chemicals. Instead it’s- “Gabe, cotton candy right? That’s not just me right? I mean, I haven’t slept in a bit, but I’ve never hallucinated tastes before.”

Gabe grins. Yet another reason pixies are awesome, their bones taste like carnivals.

He doesn’t stop grinning. Not for six hours. For a blissful six hours, Gabe smiles and touches and actually _sees_ when he looks and hears and doesn’t need and and and. They want to draw, but cannot stand the effort of finding markers and paper and a hard spot so the markers don’t go through the paper -hard seems so unnecessary, so unfortunate- so they lie on the couch, arms and legs and skin melding and talk about it, what blue is the bluest blue, if apples or fire are more red, if black is the absence of colour how can there be shades of it? They move to the floor and massage each other, the melon scented oil heaven in their nostrils. The music in the background is more than lyrics, more than beats. It’s people, humanity, pixieness, animals, _life_ in ear form, and it’s beautiful.

For six hours, Gabe smiles. And then he comes down, far faster than pot or E, not the sudden crash of salvia or cocaine. He still smiles, because even if he’s already starting to forget everything they talked about, how everything felt, he knows it was good. Pete gets off the floor to go piss, and Gabe chugs half a container of orange juice because talking for six hours has a way of drying a throat.

It doesn’t take Gabe very long to realise Pete’s taking too long in the bathroom. He walks down the hall and almost doesn’t go in, because the door is open and the light is off. And then he considers who Pete is, and gives his eyes a second to adjust to the darkness. Pete is sitting between the pedestal sink and the wall. Gabe walks in and plops down across from him, the fluffy bathmat almost ticklish against the back of his thighs. There was no concept of time, so he’s not sure when he got rubbed down. He can only hope it was nearer the start of the experience so the peach fibres don’t stick to his legs when he tries to get up.

“What’s up, Wentz?”

“It’s just-” Pete breaks off to swallow and Gabe is glad he still can’t really see Pete, because visual confirmation of what he’s guessing, that Pete is crying, will make it harder to be the cheery support that Pete needs. He fucking hates seeing people cry. “Touring, things were good. And then they got bad, and then they got really bad but it was almost over so I just stuck it out, because you can’t do that, I might feel like shit, but it’s better me than the couple thousand fans all wrecked if we have to cancel a show, the needs of the many, right? And I saw you doing that, and the self destruction kicked in and I was like why the fuck not, lets get fucked on cannibalised bits, and. But it wasn’t that, it was good, it was happy, like being manic, but smoother. Manic with fuckin’ rainbows. And some fucking how I convinced myself that it was done, that I was good. And then it was over, and fuck, it’s so much fucking worse now. So much-”

“I’m sorry,” Gabe interrupts. He didn’t mean to, he should have fucking thought about the aftermath, what a come down could do to someone that desperately needed to be happy. It’s too late for thinking, and apologies mean nothing, but he’s still sorry.

“Yeah,” Pete sighs miserably. Gabe wishes he was mad, there would be less guilt if Pete just hit him, or at least there would be an outside punishment instead of Gabe’s insides eating away at him. But anger is part of the manic side, and right now Pete probably couldn’t get mad if someone shot him in the face.

“Is there-” Gabe trails off. Pete’s been asked by a hundred different people a thousand different times if there’s anything they can do, and the fact that there’s nothing just makes him feel worse. So he shuts up and reaches his hands out and grabs both of Pete’s. He’ll sit here with him until the end of time, or until Pete feels stable enough to go back to the living room, whatever comes first. It’s the least he can do.


End file.
